Miscellany

“ There has been the hope that by going back to our nurse’s or our mother’s knee we may find the secret of human destinies. But above and beyond this folk-lore appeals to all that which goes to make romance: the myth, the saga, the legend, combine with the mysterious lore of the unseen which lies at the root of what we term superstition. ”

“ After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. ”

“ Readers will complain, I doubt not, of the very mythical and mysterious dénouement of a story which began by things so gross and palpable as field-sports and pauperism. But is it not true that, sooner or later, ‘omnia exeunt in mysterium’? Out of mystery we all came at our birth, fox-hunters and paupers, sages and saints; into mystery we shall all return . . . at all events, when we die; probably, as it seems to me, some of us will return thither before we die. ”

“ Ay, sir, a mystery.
POMPEY.
Painting, sir, I have heard say, is a mystery; and your whores, sir, being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery. But what mystery there should be in hanging, if I should be hanged, I cannot imagine.
ABHORSON.
Sir, it is a mystery.
POMPEY.
Proof.
ABHORSON.
Every true man’s apparel fits your thief. If it be too little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough; if it be too big for your thief, your thief thinks it little enough. ”

“ Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. ”

“ The recollection came like a track of fire across his brain. Memory! how glorious, how terrible art thou! With the wand of the enchanter thou canst change every current of feeling into joy or woe. The same agency—nay, the same object—shall awaken the most opposite emotions. The simplest forms and the subtlest agents are alike to thee. Nature seems fashioned at thy will, and her attributes are but the instruments of thy power. ”

“ One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident."—For the writer who works from the outside in, it is entirely possible to develop from "some quality of the brute incident" a narrative that shall be not only stirring in its propulsion of events but also profound in its significance of elemental truth. ”

“ For though to you, for instance, it may seem impossible to worship Mystery with one lobe of the brain, and with the other to explain it, the thought that this may not seem impossible to others should not discourage you; it is but another little piece of that Mystery which makes life so wonderful and sweet. ”

“ Would you disorganize the minds of the whole human family, by opening to them frightful volumes which would craze and bewilder, rather than direct them? Do you complain of mystery, and yet call upon God for more? ”

“ Hours, and they were the longest, were consecrated to my writing-table, putting the results of research and reading into words, defining Mischief in its all-embracing, universe-covering aspect, hewing the phrases from my unwilling brain as the blocks of marble are hewn out of the quarry. As I write, my old MSS. rises before me like a ghost, a disorderly ghost, erased, rewritten, pieces added in, pieces cut out, every scratched and blotted line bearing testimony to the toil that produced it. ”

“ What have I to do with Custom, that is the Mistress of all evil Practices? We ought to accustom ourselves to the best Things: And by that Means, that which was uncustomary would become habitual, and that which was unpleasant would become pleasant ”

“ Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower. Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put sub specie eternitatis by the sorcery of art. ”

“ So that, beginning with the germinal idea of mystery which the savage gets from a display of power in another transcending his own, and the germinal sentiment of awe accompanying it, the progress is toward an ultimate recognition of a mystery behind every act and appearance, and a transfer of the awe from something special and occasional to something universal and unceasing.
No one need expect, then, that the religious consciousness will die away, or will change the lines of its evolution. ”

“ Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; whoso recognises the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which is everywhere under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe is an Oracle and Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattlestall,—he shall be a delirious Mystic ”

“ This people who have been scattered among the Gentiles God is collecting out from among them for His own glorious purpose and work. Thus scattered they have been a mystery—a mystery among the Gentiles. ”

“ Impatiently they pay their money in advance, and on the public bed, not yet grown cold after the body of their predecessor, aimlessly commit the very greatest and most beautiful of all universal mysteries—the mystery of the conception of new life. ”

“ He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the mystery enveloping her—a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of complete separation from the contact of the world—the mystery that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves. ”

“ Forming a History of the Private Life, Intrigues, and Amours of many Characters in the most elevated Sphere; every Scene and Transaction, however ridiculous, whimsical, or extraordinary, being fairly represented, as becomes a faithful Historian, who is fully determined not to sacrifice Truth at the shrine of Guilt and Folly. ”

“ The melancholy baldness and coldness with which they narrate events upon which one would like to linger is absolutely humbling to the imagination; which, kindled by the simple historical outline, looks in vain for the satisfaction of those doubts and inquiries, those hopes and fears, which the provoking narrative inspires only to defraud. ”

“ Henry James, in his genial essay on "The Art of Fiction," has cast a vivid light on this objection. "There is an old-fashioned distinction," he says, "between the novel of character and the novel of incident which must have cost many a smile to the intending fabulist who was keen about his work.... What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?... It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be hard to say what it is. ”

“ Still, a mystery, inscrutable under the ordinary operations of nature, appears to hang over the whole proceeding, and though a legend only, yet the events bear a wonderful semblance and affinity to truth, even in their wildest details. ”

“ MISCELLANISTS. Miscellanists are the most popular writers among every people; for it is they who form a communication between the learned and the unlearned, and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great divisions of the public. Literary Miscellanies are classed among philological studies. The studies of philology formerly consisted rather of the labours of arid grammarians and conjectural critics, than of that more elegant philosophy which has, within our own time, been introduced into literature, and which, by its graces and investigation, augment the beauties of original genius. ”

“ There are many such,—dramas on the stage of history, life scenes that are pictures in action, tales pathetic, stirring, enlivening, full of the element of the unusual, of the stuff the novel and the romance are made of, yet with the advantage of being actual fact. ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ But this mass of character could never have been presented to us without a corresponding variety of incident; and, indeed, the tragedy is packed with an endless succession of incidents—battles, intrigues, marriages, divorces, treacheries, reconciliations, deaths. ”

“ Now, if this be the inalienable, the natural power of mesmerism, to what degree, in what manner, and with what result, as to any intelligence given, or to be required to be given, do the mesmerisers of mad bulls and of savage dogs enter into the animus of the animal they make submit to them? I am not saying that brutes have thoughts, as we have thoughts, but they have intentions, motives, and cognisances, which, if mesmerism be a concurrent congruous consistent power, ought to be perceptively identified in the mesmeriser. ”

“ The fashionable world discussed the extraordinary news in divers ways, and each had a theory to account for it; play, love, ambition, irregularities in private life, according to the taste of the speaker, explained the last act of the tragedy begun in 1812. ”

“ In the first of these particularly he gave the reins to his fancy, and luxuriated in every idea as it rose; in all there is that sense of mystery which formed an essential portion of his perception of life—a clinging to the subtler inner spirit, rather than to the outward form—a curious and metaphysical anatomy of human passion and perception. ”

“ For can one say that this wall, and yonder stars, and my neighbors, and even my own daily self, are the Atmân of the Hindoos, or are the Mystic Absolute, or are anything else that you feel when you are in a trance? Now these objects yonder are well known to be real. Reality means for everybody a character that they possess. Hence the mystic needs no further notice. He substitutes his feelings for the solid facts. ”

“ The attraction of my small charges was a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself as daily beauty? ”

“ The scenes recorded here are not literature but history, and the characters who figure in them are not puppets of the imagination, but men and women who lived and schemed, laughed, sinned and suffered, and paid the price when the time came, most of them, without flinching. ”

“ We all now illustrate together, in higgledy-piggledy fashion, or as a vast monotonous mob, our own wonderful period and order, and nothing else; whereby the historic imagination, under its acuter need of facing backward, gropes before it with a vain gesture, missing, or all but missing, the concrete other, always other, specimen which has volumes to give where hearsay has only snippets. ”

“ The solution of the mystery, which is revealed in an intensely dramatic court scene, is the most astonishing feature of the book. In addition to the attraction of the mystery, there is a fascinating love-story. ”

“ I was again in the whirlpool of active existence, and the world around me was deep—triple deep—in all cases of loving and hating, and plotting and gambling, of intriguing, countermining, and betraying, as very polite people would know how to do: occupations to watch, which inspire an intensity of interest unknown in any other condition of existence. ”

“ If I have occasionally given way to those erratic flights of fancy which led me to believe myself a scion of a noble house, well born and nurtured, with wealth at my command and a high station in store, all these delusions were nothing to the creative efforts of her imagination, who commenced by reminding me of a hundred people who never existed, and places and incidents which were all as unreal. ”

“ And after all, if the affirmative is reached, the mesmerist may decline to accept or associate with the spirits to which suck power shall be ascribed. For the power, if it did exist, was not human, unless, says the mesmerist, "it was mesmerism." Then we must reply—Then mesmerism, too, is not merely human. ”

“ We read with a smile of amusement and pity, the account of some provincial conjuror, who follows, with slight changes, the trade of the Witch of Endor; and we then compose our features to a grave expression of interest—for so society requires—to listen to some enlightened person's description of the latest novelties in table-turning or spirit-rapping ”

“ In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, — knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. ”

“ In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, our imperfect civilization, our superstitious beliefs, our strange and half-barbarous customs mingled romance with everything: characters were strongly marked, imagination was powerful, existence mysterious and concealed. ”

“ Moral relations may intrude, and we get the symbolic picture, such as those of Watts and Blake. Drama, myth and legend may intrude and we get the Ladies of Shallot, the Ledas, and the Calumnies of Apelles. ”

“ The impression which might be created by the delivery of any particular passage, or by the expression of any occasional sentiment, he seems at all times to consider as of subordinate importance to the preservation of that permanent character, whether of intense and overpowering suffering, or wild desperation, by which he thinks the feelings of the spectators may be most deeply and heartily interested. ”

“ You know, sir, this is where you writing folk have at disadvantage the chaps who only live their stories—you see the yarn from the beginning to the end, we see but those chapters in which Fate makes us characters. ”